Something about Spring

     I grab my pencil, camera, and one of my numerous spiral-bound notebooks, headed outdoors.

      Spring is tiptoeing her way here again, bowing to Winter as they pass each other in this annual dance. She alternates between smiles of gentle sunshine and tears, such a fickle personality.
   Bare feet, wet grass, soft ground; the earth is beginning to breathe again, breaking through the frozen barriers, filling lungs with new air. It smells fresh out here; new, cleansed. The birdsong has returned and the frogs vocalize together, using their throats after a long rest.

     I see flowers blooming, but the trees haven't yet unfurled the green love letters they wrote last winter.

      Chives are coming again in the garden, shy, but sure of their right to be there. Brash, cheeky, and eternally optimistic maple seedlings have sprouted en mass wherever they please. The rhubarb is pushing up underneath the hydrangea bush, the new life pushing through the skeletons of last year's blossoms.
     
      I think on the words of Anne of Green Gables, how spring always "makes her go a bit mad", and I can relate. I go to one of my favorite childhood trees, putting the notebook between my teeth so I can climb with both hands, and a page falls out. I pick it up; a forgotten letter I wrote to a dear friend, a letter I never sent. Memories.
Sad mingled with sweet.

     But I push them away after dwelling for a moment, scrambling up the slippery bark on the slender tree until I'm sitting nestled among the branches. I feel the tree sway slightly as I shift my weight, and laugh at how I must look; a 17 year old with long, messy light brown hair, bedecked in an old hoodie, yoga pants tied up in a knot around my knees, and bare feet dangling out of an old crooked vine maple in the middle of a former cow pasture, scribbling studiously and dreamily in a notebook.

     But the little and unusual things in life are beautiful. It's peaceful here.

    There's something about Spring. The excitement of fresh starts, seeing old and familiar sights again, new greenery everywhere, flowers, new beginnings and old returns. The stirring of life after Winter's sleep inducing lullaby; the birds flitting in chorus, the sap in the trees pumping again, the squirrels remembering their mischief, flowers and leaves unfurling and stretching in their sunbaths and showers.

     The stirring in your soul, the excitement in the air and tingling under your feet, it can't be captured. Spring, though temperamental, is free as a thought, and won't be captured, contained, or bottled.

     There's just something lovely about Spring.